Coetzee's Purgatorial Africa: The Case Of Disgrace

Abstract

Coetzee's latest novel is placed in the context of those other modern European literary constructions of sub-equatorial Africa that project the subcontinent as a purgatorial space beyond the pre-modern options of the infernal and paradisiacal. This high-cultural intertext, mediated by the hero's (cultivated) consciousness, should be given as much weight as the contemporary historical transformation of South Africa, which is here seen as replaying some of the motifs of its early colonial beginnings. In the old frontier territory to which Lurie goes after his 'disgrace', he encounters the new and frighteningly unmarked temporal 'frontier' of decolonization. This wider argument is then anchored textually in: (a) a description of the novel's narrative mode as a stylistic hybrid connoting a somewhat dated high modernism; and (b) the hero's habit of inwardly experimenting with the shapes and meanings of words. This verbal obsession subserves his continuing battle against the bureaucratic rationalization both of the academy and of late-modern global culture in general. The very imperfection of his protest - its compromise by his 'disgrace' - is a 'grace' of sorts, protecting him as it does from the orthodoxies of subversion. 'Africa' names an afterlife in this world, compounded at once of gratuitous violence and gratuitous revelation.